


Rule Number Two

by Winnie_Chester



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: F/F, Pining, Possibly Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-22
Updated: 2016-07-22
Packaged: 2018-07-26 01:53:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7555546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winnie_Chester/pseuds/Winnie_Chester
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holtzmann was absolutely not going to fall for Erin. She'd been down that path before, and she's learned her lesson. She lived her life by three rules; all learned the hard way. 1). Always use safety goggles. 2). No crushes on straight women. 3). No wearing long scarves around open flames.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rule Number Two

Holtzmann was absolutely not going to fall for Erin. She'd been down that path before, and she's learned her lesson. She lived her life by three rules; all learned the hard way. 

1). Always use safety goggles.  
2). No crushes on straight women.  
3). No wearing long scarves around open flames.

If her twenties had been about figuring out what sort of life she wanted (happy, intellectually fulfilling) and her teens had been about growing comfortable in her own skin then she was going to dedicate her thirties to putting all that knowledge to good use. So, no crushes on straight women. Dr. Erin Gilbert included. 

Of course, feelings were a lot harder to control than, say, her hairstyle or academic trajectory. Turning down a highly paid defense contract to work with Abby had been slightly difficult-- they'd offered her a lot of money, a huge budget, and a gorgeous lab and she wasn't totally immune to all that of course--but ultimately it had been in her control. She didn't want to work for the government--it was boring, and she didn’t do well with authority figures-- but she did want to work with Abby who was nice and made her laugh, and so a tiny apartment and Abby's lab it was. 

But her heart, it turned out, was turning out to be nearly completely outside of her sphere of influence. 

This wasn't exactly new information to Holtzmann. She had her own brain pretty well mapped, and though she sometimes chose to pretend for other people that she didn't-- maybe couldn't-- feel, she knew better. She had feelings (and, frequently both Feelings and FEELINGS); she was just pretty good at ignoring them. 

She'd learned to ignore them in high school, and it had proven to be a fairly good defense mechanism until she'd been caught just after winter break of her freshman year building actual defense mechanisms.

She'd just wanted to stop whoever kept smearing wet cat food over her locker, and though she eventually proved to the principal she hadn't actually built a bomb, the "Psycho Bomber" nickname had stuck. It turned out a Psycho Bomber didn't need to protect her feelings from anyone because after that no one but her parents even bothered to talk to her. 

It hadn't been all bad.

It had almost been freeing really, because once she'd become Psycho Bomber she'd stopped worrying about what anyone else thought about her. She'd cut her hair and thrown out every boring piece of clothing her mother had ever bought her. She'd stocked up on combat boots and clothing made of more practical (and less flammable) materials and she'd given herself permission to shop in the boys department whenever she wanted because boys clothing always had deeper, sturdier pockets. If no one was going to be friends with Psycho Bomber anyway, she may as well have pockets she could actually carry something in. 

She did what she liked and ate what she liked and sat how she liked and found that the liberation took a little of the edge off her loneliness. She made mix tapes to listen to on her headphones at school during lunch and turned her parent's basement into a pretty decent lab given that she'd built most of her equipment herself from spare pieces scrounged from dumpsters and broken appliances she bought for a song at Goodwill. She made her little corner of the world her own. It was almost bearable.

College had been a different story. She'd gotten a full ride to Caltech, where there were lots of Psycho Bomber kids--she wasn't even in the Top 10 of weirdest kids in her class. She'd loved her classes and the state of the art labs filled with shiny equipment she'd never had the chance to play with but mostly she'd loved Megan, the girl who sat one row ahead and three people to the left of her in the freshman seminar on Photons.

Holtzmann might not have had a lot of practice with people-- much less dating-- but she had listened to thousands and thousands of hours of upbeat love songs so she didn't feel completely unprepared. She'd joined Megan's study group and set about wooing her. First, she lent Megan a sweater when the class was particularly over air conditioned. Then, Holtzmann bought her a yellow polka dot umbrella after she had shown up to class soaking wet one rainy afternoon. They started meeting for lunch or pizza and soon they were staying up late studying for midterms together. 

Eventually, Megan had stopped trying to talk to Holtzmann about boys and, to reward her, Holtzmann made her a mixed tape. When it turned out Megan didn't have a tape deck, she'd built her one that not only played tapes but also doubled as a hot plate so Megan could make coffee in her dorm room. Megan let her hold her hand sometimes and she'd nearly pee her pants laughing the first time Holtzmann danced for her. Holtzmann felt like it was going great. She started referring to Megan as her girlfriend when she talked to her Mom. 

But then Caleb had joined their little study group-- Caleb who wasn't nearly as smart as Megan (much less Holtzmann). Stupid Caleb, who dominated class discussions without adding anything to them. Stupid Caleb with his stupid symmetrical face and his inability to rationally discuss any theories he disagreed with. Holtzmann hated him, but Megan couldn't get enough. She started inviting him out to get pizza with them after class and she laughed at all his bad jokes and Holtzmann couldn't fucking stand it. 

One night after dinner, while Megan was in the bathroom putting on a fresh coat of lipstick, Holtzmann and Caleb got into an argument over who would walk Megan back to her dorm-- as though Caleb's muscles would keep Megan any more protected than the homemade super strength pepper spray gun Holtzmann kept in the side pocket of her backpack. Holtzmann was making a rather impassioned but very logical argument about her obvious superiority as a body guard when Caleb smirked and—checking over his shoulder first to make sure Megan was still out of earshot-- told Holtzmann that Megan didn't like her "like that." 

It landed like a punch. The idea had never occurred to Holtzman before. She'd always sort of thought that female sexuality was just a little more fluid than male sexuality, and that anyone who held her hand surely liked liked her. She'd assumed they were just taking it slow. 

It occurred to Holtzmann that maybe she understood the building blocks of the universe more than she understood other people. She felt like she might cry or, better, punch Caleb, but instead she turned on her robot safety mode, shook his hand and left the restaurant. 

She ignored six phone calls, fifteen text messages and two emails from Megan and skipped class for three days in a row while she processed Caleb's new data. And cried.

But in her bones, she was a scientist. A good scientist. And Caleb was, at best, a mediocre scientist and though she was willing to entertain the idea that he had more knowledge in this particular field, she wasn't willing to accept his conclusion without running an experiment of her own. 

So she decided to see if she could replicate his findings. She traded the transparent toaster she'd made (she was very particular about the degree of brownness on her toast) to a kid on her floor in exchange for a bottle of wine and invited Megan over to watch a movie. She rewired her lights so she could dim them, made her bed for the first time since she'd arrived and put on the tight Smurfs t-shirt Megan had unearthed for her at a thrift shop one afternoon while they were shopping together. Conditions were favorable. 

But it had not gone as planned. 

Megan was straight. Megan made it very very clear she was straight. Holtzmann was devastated. Megan said she had thought they were friends. 

It took another two months and a lot more tears for Holtzmann to realize they couldn’t even be that anymore. Holtzmann dropped out of the class and threw herself into a series of independent studies. She told herself she was fine until, eventually, she was. 

That was the first time. Holtzmann had accidentally gone after straight girls on two more occasions before her 25th birthday and had gotten her heart broken every time. The last time, she'd gotten over it by trying to build a machine that could, theoretically, take someone forward in time but she never figured out how to bring them back and, if she was being honest, she'd been slightly more reckless with her physical safety than strictly necessary. Eventually, Dr. Gorin had stepped in and told her she had to shelve it. Holtzmann had eventually gotten over Lindsey, too.

Still, she'd learned her lesson. At 32, she'd gotten much better at reading the signs and she was now five for eight in the kissing girls department and on the whole was much happier. 

So, no more crushes on straight girls. Never. Holtzmann liked being part of The Ghostbusters, she liked the work she was doing and she couldn't risk a straight girl breaking her heart and her focus again. Not even Erin with her ridiculous shoes and her hair that always smelled like fruit and her bravery and her unimaginably appealing intellectual curiosity. Not this time. 

Holtzmann just had to keep telling herself that until it came true.


End file.
